Siu Sylvia Lee is an associate professor in the Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics. She received a B.A. in Biochemistry from Rice University in 1995 and a Ph.D. from Baylor College of Medicine in 1999. She received her postdoctoral training at the Department of Molecular Biology of Massachusetts General Hospital & the
Department of Genetics of Harvard Medical School, where she was awarded
a Damon Runyon Cancer Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship.

She joined
the faculty at Cornell in 2003. She
is in the graduate fields of Genetics & Development, Biochemistry, Molecular, & Cell Biology, and Nutrition. Her research is supported by the National Institute of Aging and the Ellison Medical Foundation. She teaches BioBM/BioGD/Tox437: Regulation of Cell Proliferation, Senescence, and Death.

Research Description

Although aging is a universal process, little is known about its molecular underpinnings. Our laboratory is interested in elucidating the conserved molecular pathways that modulate longevity. Emerging research has revealed longevity determinants capable of regulating aging in diverse organisms, from yeast, to invertebrates, to mammals, highlighting the high degree of conservation in the molecular mechanisms that govern longevity. Our research focuses on using the powerful genetic model round worm Caenorhabditis elegans to identify and functionally characterized the evolutionarily conserved genetic determinants important for longevity. As a long term goal, we hope to test whether our findings in C. elegans also hold true in other diverse organisms, including fruit flies and mice. A better understanding of the mechanistic basis of aging will have important implications for the prevention and treatment of many crippling age-dependent diseases, such as cancer, late onset diabetes, and neurodegeneration. more